Examined Life

(dir. Astra Taylor | Canada | 2008 | 87 min.)

Review by Hugh Lilly

It is a rare thing that a film rooted in academia can both inform and entertain its audience. Astra Taylor, a Canadian filmmaker, whose début feature was a study of the heavily-accented Slovenian psychoanalyst and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek, returns with a film that presents a wider picture of modern thinking, interviewing eight philosophers about their areas of expertise. The film’s tagline is “Philosophy is in the streets,” and this is reflected in the unusual way Taylor presents her interviewees; they walk around the streets of metropolises talking directly to the camera—a world away from the cloistered environment of academia. The film takes its title from Socrates’ famous line in Plato’s Apology, “the life which is unexamined is not worth living”.

Each philosopher gets about ten minutes of screen time, and the film opens and closes with segments featuring the existentialist Cornel West, probably the best known of the film’s subjects. The existentialist philosopher, with his slightly-greying afro bouncing around, leans forward from the back of a car in rush hour New York traffic, preaching about the futility of life and explains how blues music influences his work.

NYU professor Avital Ronell is perhaps the most self-absorbed and pretentious speaker. Suspicious “historically and intellectually of the promise of meaning” in philosophy, she walks around Central Park critically debating little more than the film itself and Taylor’s expectations of her subjects. The Australian applied ethics expert Peter Singer ponders the morality of consumerism and the ethics of affluence on Fifth Avenue, one of the world’s most expensive shopping districts. Set to the bustling rhythms of midday Manhattan streets—and cut to the swirling sounds of the blind jazz composer Moondog—this segment is among the film’s most entertaining.

There is a recurring question in Taylor’s collected conversations: “Is philosophy a search for meaning?” This is never quite answered—not that it could be in such a limited time frame. Instead, each interviewee has free reign on their ten minutes at the podium. This leads to interesting commentary that probably would not have emerged had the speakers been limited to specific topics. Kwame Anthony Appiah, a Ghanaian/British thinker on cosmopolitanism, discusses the complexities of modern life. With globalisation, he argues, “travelling through an airport, you pass more people in a few minutes than our most remote human ancestors would have seen in their entire lives.”

Martha Nussbaum discusses social justice, welfare and disabilities while strolling along a lakefront walkway. Taylor then changes location entirely, switching to Slavoj Žižek in a garbage dump, discussing a new approach to ecology. Žižek, who is always enjoyable—his film The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema was massively entertaining—argues that humans should “move away from trying to find our roots in nature,” and instead focus on becoming more alienated from the earth; more artificial. The sci-fi aspect of his comments segues nicely into a segment on the limits of the body with the post-structuralist feminist Judith Butler in San Francisco.

Butler is joined by the director’s sister, Sunaura Taylor, an activist for disability rights. Taylor, who is herself disabled, said she moved to San Francisco from Brooklyn because it is a more accessible city than New York. She and Butler discuss stigmas attached to disability, and the extent to which the disabled are dependent upon others. They also discuss the body and its functions, and the question of where the body ends and artifice takes over, which links both to Žižek’s comments on ecology and Nussbaum’s thoughts about human capabilities.

Examined Life is an unconventional ‘talking heads-type documentary that is engrossing despite its brevity. It removes philosophy from its stigmatised ivory tower and makes it accessible—although, thankfully, it never dumbs down its subject or strays into pop philosophy; Taylor’s film retains the intellectual feel of a piece of academic writing while at the same time conveying ideas and thoughts in an easily-understood manner.

Examined Life screens at the upcoming New Zealand International Film Festival in Auckland on July 12th, 13th, 14th and 15th at various times.

Winnebago Man

(dir. Ben Steinbauer | USA | 2009 | 87 mins.)

Review by Hugh Lilly

In 1989, Jack Rebney, an imposingly tall man with a loud ‘made for radio’ voice, made a series of industrial commercials for Winnebago, a company that builds motor homes and recreational vehicles. Filmed at the height of a boiling Iowan summer and with a largely inexperienced crew, tempers flared. The shoot was eventually completed, though, and Rebney left Winnebago and retreated to the serenity of the hills above California.

But outtakes from the shoot, featuring Rebney’s booming tenor spouting a series of unintentionally hilarious expletives at the camera man and other crew members, became infamous, making Rebney an underground star. Ben Steinbauer’s film tells the tale of the outtakes, and Rebney’s re-entry to the limelight, alongside a brief history of the viral video.

Rebney’s colourful catchphrases quickly became a pop culture phenomenon, spreading around the world through pre-Internet TV clip shows, offbeat little bric-a-brac film festivals and, eventually video sites like YouTube. References started appearing in TV shows like 30 Rock—the episode where Alec Baldwin’s character is taping a promo and keeps forgetting his lines—and Rebney’s antics were parodied by amateurs and professionals alike, most hilariously by an Italian YouTube enthusiast.

The film, made last year, finds Rebney living what looks like a peaceful, calm existence in a cabin in the woods above L.A. The director confronts Rebney with the fact that he’s become famous for something that happened twenty years ago, and is now known to a legion of fans variously as The Angriest Man In The World, The World’s Angriest RV Salesman or simply Winnebago Man.

Steinbauer convinces a reluctant Rebney to appear at a screening of the foul-mouthed outtakes at the Found Footage Festival in San Francisco, where he realises that the people who adore him aren’t just Internet ‘wackos’. Winnebago Man is an uproarious look at how pop culture phenomena are born, and the lasting effects they have on their unwitting stars.

Winnebago Man screens at the upcoming New Zealand International Film Festival in Auckland on Wednesday 15th and Thursday 16th July.

The September Issue

The September Issue

(dir. R.J. Cutler | USA | 2008 | 90 mins.)

Review by Hugh Lilly

A profile of Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour and the making of the September 2008 issue of the magazine, R.J. Cutler’s new documentary is chock full of style—which unfortunately means there’s not much room left for substance. Playing out like a considerably extended episode of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy or one of Louis Theroux’s more esoteric Weird Weekends, the film presents Wintour as an unapproachable, cold authority figure at the head of the world’s “fashion bible.”

The titular issue is, we’re informed, the most important of the year: “In the fashion world, September is January,” remarks a commentator near the beginning. The final tally for the issue was 840 pages—the biggest in the magazine’s history to that point—and, to its detriment, Cutler’s 9-month odyssey leading up to the publication of that issue would have those unfamiliar with the magazine believe that its glossy pages are composed almost entirely of photographs and advertising. There are no interviews with any writers, and the film doesn’t explore in any particular depth any of the photographers or other artists or stylists. It does, however, follow quite closely Grace Coddington, a former model for the magazine-turned editorial stylist. Coddington, essentially Wintour’s right-hand woman, sets up and directs the magazine’s photoshoots and becomes the film’s focus. Her story and persona is a welcome relief from the stereotypes that populate the rest of the film.

British-born Wintour, notorious for being an ‘ice queen,’ is shown as such; aloof and “accessible only to those who she needs to be accessible to,” it almost seems as if the angularly-coiffed, heavily-botoxed icon of the fashion world is putting on a show for the cameras; surely someone in as presumably enjoyable a job as hers, jet-setting around the world and meeting titans of industry wouldn’t really be that unhappy? Because she almost never lets her guard down, Wintour presents herself almost as self-parody, and this quickly becomes tiresome.

The film travels with Coddington and her team as they chase photographers, stylists and that month’s cover girl Sienna Miller around Europe, scouting locations and preparing shoots. There’s a shoot in Rome, and one at Versailles, a much-used location recently fetishised in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette and visited by the makers of Annie Leibovitz: Life Through A Lens—a far more in-depth, fascinating documentary about fashion, celebrity and artistry than The September Issue. Cutler’s film is clearly designed to appeal to a specific market: devotees of fashion and entertainment television networks like E!, and in this it succeeds, albeit not admirably.

The film looks the part—it won the ‘Best Cinematography (US Documentary)’ award at Sundance last year—but unfortunately its flashiness cannot make up for its flaws and anaemic pseudo-insight. The September Issue is entertaining, to be sure, but it explores its subject matter superficially, trying to cover up the fact with quick-cut editing and an oh-so-hip roster of indie pop on its soundtrack. Cutler, whose 1992 documentary The War Room was an illuminating and insightful account of Bill Clinton’s Presidential campaign, has here regrettably substituted glossiness for substance, never once provoking his subjects lest they admonish him, and opting for Office-like ‘reality’ camerawork which yields nothing new; traditional ‘talking-head’ interview footage, which is used for barely ten per cent of the film, would doubtless have given audiences something to think about, instead of being mindlessly entertained by flashing lights and zippy editing. For an industry that many see as ridiculous and pompous to be presented as such is unfortunate to say the least. Perhaps the rarefied world of haute-couture will be better served by Matt Tyranauer’s Valentino: The Last Emperor, a profile of the world-renowned Italian designer.

The September Issue screens in the upcoming New Zealand International Film Festivals in Auckland’s Civic Theatre on Friday July 10^th at 2pm, and Saturday July 11^th at 7pm.

Preview: 2009 Auckland Film Festival

The 2009 Auckland International Film Festival is being held from July 9^th to the 26^th. The full programme is yet to be finalised; the organisers have just made their selections from the Cannes Film Festival, which finished last week and included Quentin Tarantino’s spell-check-defying Nazi-scalping WWII pic Inglourious Basterds and that crazy Dane Lars von Trier’s “deliberately un-releasable” experiment in sado-masochistic horror Antichrist, starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg, who won Best Actress.

Among the films confirmed to be showing at the festival there emerge three thematic threads: rebellion, fashion, and rock ‘n’ roll. In the first category there’s Che, Steven Soderbergh’s four hour epic starring Benicio del Toro as the eponymous Marxist revolutionary and countercultural symbol, shot on location in France and Spain.

There’s RiP!: A Remix Manifesto, about copyright and intellectual property; The Cove, an ‘eco-thriller’ in which a group of filmmakers, activists and free-divers breaks into a Japanese dolphin cove—with equipment borrowed from George Lucas’ Industrial Light & Magic—in order to shed light on the cruelty done to the animals there, and the critically-acclaimed Der Baader Meinhoff Komplex, Germany’s submission for Best Foreign Film in this year’s Academy Awards, which follows the West German terrorist Red Army Faction during the late-’60s and early-’70s.

For the sartorially-inclined there’s Coco avant Chanel, a biopic of the designer with Audrey Tautou in the titular role; Valentino: The Last Emperor, about the haute couture tycoon, which enjoyed the highest-grossing opening of any documentary in the US so far this year, and The September Issue, which chronicles the production of the 2008 Fall fashion issue of Anna Wintour’s Vogue magazine.

Music-wise there’s It Might Get Loud, which profiles Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, U2’s The Edge and The White Stripes’ Jack White; Soul Power, a funk-filled documentary about a legendary, sweaty 1974 concert in Zaire, and Largo, about the LA hipster hotspot where you don’t know who’s going to take the stage until you’re inside. Performers have included film composer and musician Jon Brion—who does a regular Friday night show—Fiona Apple, Wilco guitarist Nels Cline, Colin Hay, our own Neil Finn, Flight of the Conchords and Bic Runga, and comedians Sarah Silverman, Zack Galafinakis and John C. Reilly, among many others. Elliott Smith regularly played the club—a 5-track CD recorded there accompanied Autumn de Wilde’s book about the singer-songwriter in 2007—and footage of some of his shows might be in the film.

Also included: Departures, the Japanese film that won Best Foreign Film at the Oscars; Len Lye: New, Restored and Re-Discovered, about the ex-pat filmmaker and artist; Examined Life, Astra Taylor’s collected conversations with prominent philosophers including Judith Butler, Cornel West and Slavoj Žižek—the subject of her previous film; The Agony and Ecstasy of Phil Spector, which tracks the “wall of sound” producer’s fall from grace; Tyson, James Toback’s documentary about the boxer given Un Certain Régard at Cannes, and the meditative Korean drama Treeless Mountain, well-received at both Toronto and Berlin.

Keep an eye out for the programmes which should be out in the next few weeks, and check out nzff.co.nz for more information.

—Hugh Lilly

RiP!: A Remix Manifesto

RiP!: A Remix Manifesto

(dir. Brett Gaylor | Canada | 2009 | 86 mins)

A thought-provoking and vibrant new film looks at the future of art and culture in the digital age, writes Hugh Lilly

Brett Gaylor’s documentary about copyright and the place of fair use in remix culture is an exciting and thoroughly entertaining presentation of an important argument crucial to the survival of culture. The documentary investigates the current state of copyright law—a grey area when it comes to the contemporary use of digital content—and shows why it must be changed. The law as it is thwarts creativity and the free exchange of ideas and information. In an age when anything and everything can be freely accessed and remixed with the click of a mouse and a few keystrokes, such oblique litigation only halts cultural progress. In a media-literate generation that has grown up online, consumers have become creators—making, in Gaylor’s words, “the folk art of the future.” The film, made over a period of six years, is about “a war of ideas—and the battleground is the Internet.”

(source)

Under the law as it currently exists, taking bits from Back to the Future and Brokeback Mountain to insinuate that Doc Brown and Marty McFly were more than just friends makes you a criminal. Gaylor’s film argues for the relaxation of laws surrounding sampling and digital art so that borrowing elements from pre-existing material to create a wholly new work would become legal. Unfortunately, the corporations who own the rights to the ‘properties’ being ‘violated’ didn’t see things the same way. They needed to find a way—to use corporate parlance—to ‘monetize’ the information superhighway, and so they began suing the very people who bought their products.

The film’s protagonist is Gregg Gillis, a.k.a. Girl Talk, the poster boy for the remix movement. Gaylor centres his argument on Gillis’ music—his four albums have been phenomenal critical and commercial successes—using it in throughout the film both for entertainment purposes and to prove the point that mash-ups such as Gillis’ should be legal. Stanford Law professor, Creative Commons founder and free culture activist Lawrence Lessig is the film’s other touchstone; interviews with him and segments of his lectures appear throughout, as with Girl Talk, to back up and expand upon points Gaylor makes in his voiceover. The director is so enamoured, in fact, with Girl Talk (constantly referring to him as “my favourite musician”) and with Lessig (imitating the professor’s minimalist presentation style, with single-word slides changing at speaking pace) that it brings into question the depth of his research—did he rely only on a few sources that he knew wouldn’t challenge the validity of his insights?

The film is structured around the titular manifesto, penned by Lessig, which is a set of rules that can be summarised, basically, as “Limit control of the past”—because free societies depend on culture that builds upon past efforts, and restricting access to the past results in a society that cannot evolve. Lessig argues that digital natives have adopted ‘remix’ as their lingua franca, and that the mash-up is to the twenty-first century what the novel was to the nineteenth. Remix—particularly as it was used in the 2008 US Presidential election—is the ‘conversation’ of modern culture: YouTube has become a sort of global water-cooler around which we all discuss the issues of the day, responding to each other with videos the way past generations would have written letters or held court in a town square. RiP! is itself the product of remix: the film was put online—through an initiative called OpenSource Cinema—in an embryonic state in 2008 for remixers and mash-up artists to do with it what they wished; several sequences in the final cut are the work of those artists.

Copyright law, which came into existence around the mid-fifteenth century—contemporaneous with the invention of the printing press—was intended to balance the rights of author with the public’s right to benefit from that author’s works for the greater good. With media ownership now completely skewed—90% of US media is controlled by six conglomerates: GE, BMG, TimeWarner, Newscorp, Viacom and Disney—the scales used to measure that balance have been tipped upside down and thrown out the window. Now it is neither the author nor the public who benefit from copyright law; instead, it is the corporations, litigated for by two bodies: The Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America. Gaylor examines Disney’s hypocritical stance, revealing that Steamboat Willie, which marks the first appearance of Mickey Mouse, was taken wholesale from the 1926 Buster Keaton film Steamboat Bill—in fact, CEO Walt Disney gave explicit instructions to that effect. Alice In Wonderland, Snow White and countless other Disney pictures also borrowed elements from existing culture. Gaylor also interviews Dan O’Neill, an underground cartoonist and founder of the Air Pirates, a group which was famously sued by The Walt Disney Company for copyright infringement.

In the late-’90s, with the advent of Napster and other file-sharing software, the music industry, in Gaylor’s words, “refused to evolve, parted with history, and started suing.” RiP! examines the reactions on both sides, interviewing bodies such as the Register of Copyrights as well as ‘copyfighters’ such as Cory Doctorow and people who were sued by the RIAA—some of whom never even downloaded a single song. Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich, already lampooned on South Park for his Napster-hating ways, gets another ribbing here as footage of him goofily repeating the word “control” on the Charlie Rose Show is shown next to fear-mongering news reports telling people not to download music. But Ulrich, on the side of a money-hungry industry stuck in old ways, was getting it wrong. As Chuck D of Public Enemy put it in the same episode of Charlie Rose: “for the longest time people were subservient to industry controlled technology; now that Napster and other peer-to-peer technologies gave people control of the means of production and distribution, the power is back in the hands of the people.” It is important to note that Gaylor’s film does not advocate the illegal downloading or sharing of copyrighted material, but rather for an overhaul of copyright and fair use laws.

The film briefly touches on Digital Rights Management, and looks at the consequences from Radiohead’s “pay-what-you-like” experiment for In Rainbows. The writer, poet and spoken word performer William S. Burroughs also gets a mention, as does the San Francisco band Negativland, who invented the term “culture jamming” on their radio series Over The Edge. It’s a pity, given the influence of the past on the present, that Gaylor didn’t further examine the art world and its involvement with the mash-up movement; it would be interesting to look at the influence on contemporary artists of Andy Warhol, pop art and the artists The Economist recently called “the original pasticheurs.”

While Gaylor’s film might be sleeker presentation-wise than its predecessors—the Danish film Good Copy Bad Copy and the 2006 Pirate Bay documentary Steal This Film, which focussed more academically on similar subjects—it nonetheless has its weak points. The penultimate segment attempts to make an analogy between Girl Talk’s music and his day job as a lab technician; this segues into a discussion of medical patents and intellectual property, which was realised by corporations as a field more profitable than oil or gold. The corporatization of ideas is a discussion too big for this film, though, so the segment seems incongruous.

Finally, there is a sequence set in Rio de Janeiro which features musician Gilberto Gil and Lawrence Lessig showing how Brazil broke US IP law and international patents on HIV medication, producing generic equivalents for a fraction of the cost. This supposedly shows how the country’s government leads the world in IP law reform, but it suffers by relying too heavily on the emotional impact of the deliberately-chosen music in the background, and a little girl in makeup spouting a poem about freedom, togetherness and equality. Overall, though, RiP! is a highly enjoyable and provocative film that pits copyright against the copyleft, and looks at the doctrine of fair use in an age of so-called misuse. It’s a definite must-see for anyone interested in the future of the Internet, copyright and culture.

RiP!: A Remix Manifesto will screen at the Auckland Film Festival in July. See Wikipedia and ripremix.com for more.

Obama kills

“Last Saturday night, over dinner and drinks, the President of the United States was overheard saying:

“Michael Steele is in the house tonight. Or as he would say, ‘In the heezy.’

Wazzup!

For the last time, Michael, the Republican Party does not qualify for a bailout. Rush Limbaugh does not count as a ‘troubled asset.”

That’s right. At the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Obama killed. American humor in the commercial media, over the last decade, has largely trended toward the coarse and snarky, so Obama’s delivery—mature, intelligent, and martini-dry with a hip-hop twist—was thoroughly (in a word laden with meaning) disarming.”

— Pressed: Obama at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner by David Schneider

New York in the ’70s

“If New York City were to slide back into the crumbling anarchy of the 1970s, as some fear, would that be so bad? The author recalls a time when artists’ lofts were inhabited by actual artists, every subway car held potential drama, and legends–Lennon, Warhol, Garbo–walked the streets.”

“Splendor in the Grit” by James Wolcott, in the June issue of Vanity Fair.

M Ward—Hold Time

M Ward—Hold Time (Merge Records/4AD Records)

Review by Hugh Lilly

Hold Time, Matt Ward’s sixth studio release under the initialised moniker M Ward, is a lucid assortment of country-folk songs that features members of Grandaddy and DeVotchKa, among others.

Ward, a folk singer based in Portland, Oregon, is no stranger to collaboration, having worked with indie ‘it’ girl Jenny Lewis, Bright Eyes, My Morning Jacket, and, most recently, the actress and singer Zooey Deschanel. Ward met Deschanel on the set of indie flick The Go-Getter and went on to record the ’60s-inspired country-folk album Volume One under the name She & Him.

Jangly guitars and dynamic pedal steel pepper the record, and Ward has honed his ornate acoustic style to a T on Hold Time. The opener “For Beginners” builds up to a flourish of hand-claps and gives way to “Never Had Nobody Like You,” a lively near-duet with Deschanel that wouldn’t be out of place on a She & Him record.

Deschanel also appears on a spritely, reverb-soaked version of “Rave On!,” a song made popular by Buddy Holly. Also covered is Don Gibson’s “Oh Lonesome Me,” done by Neil Young on After the Gold Rush. Ward’s version—a duet with Lucinda Williams—is equally as spare and melancholy as Young’s, and Williams’ characteristic vocals bring warmth to the somber lyrics.

The atmospheric title track sets Ward’s raspy voice against swelling strings, and “To Save Me” is a bouncy pop song similar in tone to “Vincent O’Brien” from Transfiguration of Vincent. Side two opens with “Stars Of Leo,” a keyboard-driven jaunt, and “Epistemology,” is doubtless the record’s stand out track, pairing upbeat strumming with lively, open percussion. “Blake’s View” sees Ward consider the poet’s ruminations on life and death, and the instrumental outro “I’m a Fool To Want You” elegantly rounds out this singer-songwriter’s most accessible effort to date.

Yusuf—Roadsinger

Yusuf—Roadsinger (A&M Records)

Review by Hugh Lilly

Roadsinger (To Warm You Through The Night) is Cat Stevens’ second pop record since his conversion to Islam in 1978. Asked a few years ago by Jools Holland why he left the glamorous pop world, he answered “You come to a point where you have sung…your whole repertoire and you want to get down to the job of living.”

This feeling of being fed up with the spotlight—with the garish superficiality of the record business—was telegraphed early by songs like “Pop Star,” from his 1970 masterpiece Mona Bone Jakon. While that album saw the emergence of an artist wholly different to the pop singer previously known only for commercially-oriented songs like “Matthew and Son,” Roadsinger sees Yusuf Islam, as he’s now known, combine his signature finger-picking style and rich, peaceful voice to proffer his ideas, hopes and dreams for the world.

The first two tracks, “Welcome Home” and “Thinkin’ ’Bout You,” are returns to form, traditional Cat Stevens-style tunes for a new era. Laments like “World O’ Darkness” and “The Rain” colour the record and distinguish it from An Other Cup, his 2006 studio album. Whereas that record was consciously pop-oriented, nearly every track on Roadsinger covers issues of humanitarian concern—this is a troubadour promoting his particular brand of political balladry.

“Be What You Must” features a children’s choir—Islam founded the Islamia Primary School in North London—and is the tamest of all the tracks, melodically similar to “Peace Train.” The brief “In This Glass World,” with its hint of percussion and electric guitar, is the heaviest track—elsewhere Roadsinger is acoustic guitar and sweet lap steel atop eastern-influenced percussion and light string arrangements. “Shamsia,” a Persian word meaning ‘light’ is the title of the lilting closing track—a short, delicate lullaby in a minor key.

Bob Dylan—Together Through Life

Bob Dylan—Together Through Life (Columbia Records)

Review by Hugh Lilly

Together Through Life is Dylan’s 33^rd studio album, and the first to reach #1 in the UK charts since New Morning in 1970. David Hidalgo of Los Lobos and Mike Campbell of Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers join Dylan’s regular backers for ten tracks of languid accordion-heavy blues.

The commanding opener, “Beyond Here Lies Nothin’,” is a brassy, audacious paean to the end of the world, moving through “boulevards of broken cars” beyond which there’s “nothin’ but the moon and the stars.” The dusky “I Feel A Change Comin’ On” is reminiscent of “Lay Lady Lay,” and the whole record is gorgeously laid back—on “Life is Hard” ukulele and Hawaiian guitar sit effortlessly alongside gently-picked mandolin. There’s an interpretation of Willie Dixon’s “My Wife’s Home Town,” and “If You Ever Go To Houston” borrows a line from “Midnight Special,” a folk song popularised by Creedence Clearwater Revival.

Together Through Life sees Dylan age gracefully—unlike, say, Mick and Keef. The new record won’t impress Dylanologists looking for a fix, but that hasn’t stopped them decoding it. The cover photograph also graces Larry Brown’s short story collection “Big Bad Love”—“I’ve read every word the man’s ever written,” Dylan declares in a lengthy, interesting conversation with critic Bill Flanagan which begins at bobdylan.com. It seems Dylan’s been reading a lot else, too: the title may be from a Walt Whitman poem, and lyrics are drawn from sources as diverse as Ovid and Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales”. It’s worth getting the deluxe edition which includes an episode of Theme Time Radio Hour, his fantastic satellite radio show.

This is an unabashedly simple, romantic record; although there are no moments of stellar lyricism like “the ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face,” Together Through Life showcases an unguarded eccentric reminiscing.